A Survey on Bluetooth 5.0 and Mesh

Ubiquitous connectivity among objects is the future of the coming Internet of Things era. Technologies are competing fiercely to fulfill this goal, but none of them can fit into all application scenarios. However, efforts are still made to expand application ranges of certain technologies. Shortly after the adoption of its newest version, Bluetooth 5.0, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group released another new specification on network topology: Bluetooth Mesh. Combined together, those two bring Bluetooth to a brand new stage. However, current works related to it only focus on part of the new Bluetooth, and discussion over the entire one is lacking. Therefore, in this survey, we conduct an investigation toward the new Bluetooth from a comprehensive perspective. Through this, we show that the new Bluetooth not only consolidates its strengths in original application fields but also brings alterations and opportunities to new ones, making it a strong competitor in the future for providing complete solutions to meet the demands of seamless communications in the Internet of Things area.